In that order. You can click on the links above to skip to certain site contents.

I would like to say thanks to the people who that have donated to keep the servers afloat. It’s understatement to say I am poor. I spend most of my time most of my days for “work” making sure the sites are up and working and dealing with the content on them sometimes (8archive and Mixtape really). If you want to donate, donate button on the top right menu is there. Servers costs currently $245 /mo so it’s hard when you make very little. I estimate I make <$6000 a year so it’s not easy spending half of your income on servers.

startbutton.net is a new site we’re announcing tonight that is in development right now. The site is a ways off from going live. This is because startbutton.net is still in planning stages and will start development soon.

There are a lot of things that need to be answered obviously.

Q – Is this in response to basedgamer?A – No and yes. No, we’ve been planning this site since late October. Yes because we rushed to create this announcement. This was going to be a later, early 2015 project. We only were talking about what we wanted and what there should be in casual discussion.

Q – So what is community made about this site?A – The community can get involved and contribute to the project. Programmers fluent in Ruby (on Rails), Python, and PHP are welcomed to apply. We can’t make the site open source yet because we have not decided if the project’s code base could be stolen and forked before we can launch. However I am open to making it an open source initiative.

Q – How much is this site going to cost? Where will it get it’s funding and finances? Who’s gonna pay for the servers and programmers?A – The site will not need money to start development. This is community made and made 4free. So yes developers/contributors to the project will not be paid just like how 8chan and Linux contributors are not paid. And with that the site is non-profit. For keeping the site afloat, ads are always thrown around as a possible solution. I hate ads. For now the financing will be purely by donations only. If the site can’t be kept up with donations alone then ad banners will have to be put on it. The servers will be on my current servers for now. If the site expands, we plan to use a cloud based serving setup that will be able to handle much more traffic in the future.

Q – Okay then, what is this site?A – I don’t want to get in all the details. Many of them are unique and will not be there at launch. The goal is to have a multi-purpose video game database website. This means a user review system like rottentomatoes, a critic system like metacritic, a journalist review / accreditation system, a trust board / list of game critics, and more. The difference being that we don’t want to turn a game review into a number for people to look at. A different system will be developed that gives the reviewer’s thoughts and feelings into a presentable “final score” that isn’t a number, a percent, or stars that people will write off if it isn’t above a 7.5/10 score. We want to also put weight to critics and reviews. Behavior on past reviews and possibly journalistic articles can affect their weight and also their “team’s” weight. (For example if Ben Kuchera makes a review on Polygon, Polygon and Kuchera are penalized for journalistic breaches in ethics as Polygon allowed their review to be published).

We would also like to create a game database for informational purposes. The ability for someone to come to the site, type in a game, and see all the objective information about the game, it’s release, developers, it’s creation, images, videos, non-commentary gameplay demo videos, and maybe a recommendation list show of games that you’d like if you like that game that is created by the community submitting in suggestions, and more.

Like I said, there is a lot of things we can’t talk about. But that’s some of the general idea of what I will say on the site’s features that will be at launch or added in shortly after.

Q – Is that design, color, style, name all final?A – NO. Everything will evolve as the project continues. If the site name has a majority say that it should change, then so be it.

Q – What is the site going to run on?A – We’re planning to basically code the site from the ground up. We will make our own system so that we don’t rely on bloated and security prone systems that could also limit us in implementing what we want to do. We may use a code base though. Depends on what the core developer team decides.

Q – How can I contribute?A – Spread the word, submit possible design material, if you know how to code Ruby (on Rails), Python, and PHP and Javascript/AJAX, then please get in contact with Drybones. There is an IRC channel for the developers to join in. The project, if put up publicly, will be on Gitgud.net – Startbutton.net project development group

Q – How long is this going to take?A – I don’t have an estimate. But it isn’t going to be launched in 2014 if I had to do a quick guess.